At a time Iran is witnessing large-scale protests On the death of a young woman who was in police custody, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk revealed on Twitter on Monday that the company will request an exemption from sanctions imposed on Tehran for providing the Starlink satellite broadband service in the country.
However, Musk did not specify which country Starlink would seek waivers from, nor whether this step was aimed at providing the Internet to Iranians specifically, but it is known that Tehran faces wide-ranging sanctions, according to Archyde.com reported.
While many people on Twitter asked the American billionaire to provide stations for Internet services via satellite.
SpaceX aims to rapidly expand the Starlink network around the world, to compete with satellite communications companies including OneWeb.
severe restrictions
It is noteworthy that access to social media has been subject to severe restrictions in Iran for years, and the authorities, in times of protests, usually cut off the Internet in many areas, in order to limit it and not expand it.
Yesterday, for example, Internet monitoring group NetBlocks reported a “near-total” interruption of internet access in the Kurdish region’s capital, and linked this to the protests that erupted after the killing of whsa aminiA 22-year-old girl, a few days after her arrest by the so-called “moral police” or “religious police”.
I fell into a coma
It is noteworthy that Mahsa died last week, after she fell into a coma hours after her arrest, amid accusations by the security forces of beating her violently, which led to her having a stroke, especially after radiographs showed fractures in the skull of the twenty-year-old girl.
From the protests in Tehran after the death of Mahsa Amini (AFP archive)
What sparked angry protests across the country over the way the security forces were treated is still continuing, after it turned in some areas, especially in the city of Sanandaj, the capital of Kurdistan province in northwestern Iran, where the young woman is from, into demands for regime change and the overthrow of the “guardianship of the jurist.”